Most systems (Linux, OpenBSD) adjust 0.5 ms per second, or 0.5 us per
1 ms tick. That is, the clock is sped up or slowed down by at most
0.05%. This means adjusting the clock by 1 s takes 2000 s, and the
clock an be adjusted by at most 1.8 s per hour.
FreeBSD adjusts 5 ms per second if the remaining time adjustment is
>= 1 s (0.5%) , else it adjusts by 0.5 ms as well. This allows adjusting
by (almost) 18 s per hour.
Since Serenity OS can lose more than 22 s per hour (#3429), this
picks an adjustment rate up to 1% for now. This allows us to
adjust up to 36s per hour, which should be sufficient to adjust
the clock fast enough to keep up with how much time the clock
currently loses. Once we have a fancier NTP implementation that can
adjust tick rate in addition to offset, we can think about reducing
this.
adjtime is a bit old-school and most current POSIX-y OSs instead
implement adjtimex/ntp_adjtime, but a) we have to start somewhere
b) ntp_adjtime() is a fairly gnarly API. OpenBSD's adjfreq looks
like it might provide similar functionality with a nicer API. But
before worrying about all this, it's probably a good idea to get
to a place where the kernel APIs are (barely) good enough so that
we can write an ntp service, and once we have that we should write
a way to automatically evaluate how well it keeps the time adjusted,
and only then should we add improvements ot the adjustment mechanism.
And rewrite the timeval functions as inline functions.
Also add the non-standard but fairly common and useful
TIMEVAL_TO_TIMESPEC / TIMESPEC_TO_TIMEVAL functions.
As suggested by Joshua, this commit adds the 2-clause BSD license as a
comment block to the top of every source file.
For the first pass, I've just added myself for simplicity. I encourage
everyone to add themselves as copyright holders of any file they've
added or modified in some significant way. If I've added myself in
error somewhere, feel free to replace it with the appropriate copyright
holder instead.
Going forward, all new source files should include a license header.